Ricerc@Sapienza

May we plan to conduct our everyday life without referring to any kind of emotion or passion? Or, more radically, may we suppose that there is a philosophical theory claiming to either eliminate all affections or to at least control them thanks to a strong and prescriptively binding use of a form of rationality? Against the background of such dogmatic presuppositions, what about Pyrrhonists? Do they really ignore the multifarious, difficult, and complex web of all those passions and emotions that crowd and sometimes influence or change the course of our everyday life?

Moving from Frans De Waal's book "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are", the development of the science of animal behavior is critically discussed. The role of ethology in transforming moral ideas about non-human animals is presented and argumented for.

Identity is a long discussed concept in many areas of philosophy. Authors of the Forum tackle the notion of identity, focusing on its history and its theoretical analysis. The normative claim embedded in the notion of identity is analysed in relation with its biological, psychological, metaphysical and political aspects.

The mutual influence between Derrida and Levinas is well known. Derrida devoted numerous texts to Levinas and, although the references to Derrida in Levinas are scarcer, we are far from ignoring the profound influence of “Violence and Metaphysics” in the transition from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being.

References to moral exemplars run deep into the history of philosophy, as we find them featured in rather disparate context and approaches which span from virtue ethics to moral perfectionism, from existentialism to moral particularism. In the varied and growing contemporary literature on moral exemplarism, we find a number of options that can be brought down to the two rather broad yet distinctive categories of theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches.

The present Symposium aims at challenging some received views about the meaning and legacy of Rorty’s ethical and political philosophy, as well as at furthering new interpretations and reworkings of his writings on such topics.

Introduction to the Symposium on Richard Rorty's Moral and Political Philosophy I have edited.

The issue of the advantage or rather dangerousness of redescriptive activities motivated Rorty’s landmark private/public divide, and yet, upon closer inspection, the divide itself needs to be rethought precisely in the light of the possibility that the ironist attitude can jeopardize the quest for public solidarity by frustrating one’s fellow beings in their tentative activities of identities-formation.

Despite he did not write any full-fledge and comprehensive treatise of the kind Thomas Jefferson, Walter Lippman, or John Rawls did, William James is among the great American liberal philosophers. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, and John Dewey and Richard Rorty after him, James was in fact highly skeptical of the opportunity of theorizing upon such matter – and much else –, mostly because of his wider distrust of top-down, idealized approaches in philosophical and political matters alike.

Both Kant and James’smoral philosophies challenged generations of scholars, proving to be much more complicated and multi-faced than even an attentive look might betray. Kant is in fact not the hard-nosed deontologist pictured by modern and contemporary commentators alike, as James is not a flamboyant consequentialist. Or, at least, not only. And this is not